This third group, therefore, threw all its weight on
the side of the North. In this group Lincoln recognized his
allies, and their cause he identified with his own in his letter
to English workmen which was quoted in the previous chapter.
Their leaders in Parliament were Richard Cobden, W. E. Forster,
and John Bright. All these groups were represented in the
Liberal party, which, for the moment, was in power.
In the Cabinet itself there was a "Northern" and a "Southern"
faction. Then, too, there were some who sympathized with the
North but who felt that its cause was hopeless--so little did
they understand the relative strength of the two sections--and
who felt that the war was a terrible proof of the uselessness of
mere suffering. Gladstone, in later days, wished to be thought
of as having been one of these, though at the time, a famous
utterance of his was construed in the North as a declaration of
hostility. To a great audience at Newcastle he said in October,
1862: "We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for
or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis
and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are
making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than
either--they have made a nation.
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